>>Flashing across California desert skies, the airplanes you see
here are writing new chapters in the story of man made flight....there she goes!
>>This is my first opportunity to greet you as deputy administrator
of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
>>Together, you and I must make our new agency
>>A most unusual place
>>An organization that can challenge conventional wisdom.
>>We can engineer anything we can write the requirements for.
>>We're going to make your idea work.
This particular idea is quite disruptive.
>>A typical flight, of course, starts under the wing of the B-52 mothership.
>>This sleek, high speed machine would have made Rube Goldberg proud.
>>The manner in which we fly reentry from space,
on the space shuttle was pioneered on the X-15.
>>The X-31 pretty much wrote the book on thurst vectoring, along with its sister program, the F-18 HARV.
>>An observation of an occulation is
one of the more challenging missions that SOFIA can do.
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>>Right now, we are looking at the dawn of a new era of aviation.
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>>Something has now emerged
that might make even our most elegant theories workable.
>>Scientists developed equipment which would be able to think...
>>...machines that do things and make choices without human beings,
that uncanny spectacle is automation.
>>...capable of storing, processing...
>>>...calculations that would ordinarily take hundreds of man hours;
unique ability to check itself on possible errors...
>>>...cheaper and quicker and better.
>>...electric eyes, limit switches, servo mechanisms...
>>...secretary, librarian,
banker, teacher, medical technician, bridge partner...
>>...volumes of changing data into a continuous flow of interpretations.
>>Aladdin's lamp couldn't do more.
>>...jaws, loading machines, electric drills...
...it's all automation.
>>Computers have taken wing.
>>By the late 1960s, digital computers had become more available...
>>...using data about the aircraft's performance,
the computers vote on the correct amount of control deflection
to make in response to the pilot's stick and rudder movements.
>>This system
could make air travel of the future smoother and safer by reducing aircraft
vibrations through automatic response from the computer to the aircraft controls.
>>We did the digital engine control, we had an early
large digital computer that ran the engine and the inlet and exhaust system.
>>We did an integrated control study to provide digital control
of the inlets, autopilot, throttle, air data, and navigation system.
...a digital computer here...
...major improvement in the capability of the airplane...
>>Test pilots are flying a plane without having to leave the ground
It's a new way of flight testing advanced aircraft that's both more economical
and less hazardous.
A research pilot in a realistically recreated cockpit
on the ground, complete with flight controls, flies the remotely piloted
craft using computers and television.
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>>The airplane includes computers...
...those computers take stick commands and...
>>...continuously monitor what
the airplane is doing and compares it to what the pilot wants the airplane to do.
>>The computer signals the
control surfaces to not only execute the pilot's maneuver,
but also to counter any attempt by the X-29
to veer out of control.
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>>Fly up! Fly up!
>>Yikes! No doubt about it, we didn't get a roll through on that one...
>>You've got it.
>>...a new initiative in the artificial
intelligence area and it's called aircraft automation.
The technologies that end up coming out of this would be autonomous flight
vehicle technology.
>>ERAST stands for Environmental Research Aircraft and Sensor Technology...
...platforms that could fly higher and longer than the current piloted airplanes...
...do science missions and other commercial applications...
>>Primarily the dull, dirty, and dangerous.
>>We can go all the way up to where the airplane can fly itself
completely autonomously with no input from anyone on the ground.
>>Fly up to 50, 60 thousand feet, fly a circle loop
perhaps over a city, providing the capability that a satellite now does.
>>Now that we can fly for on the order of 8 to 10 to 12 hours,
we can look at long duration processes- biogeochemical cycling,
looking at carbon and nitrogen moving through an ecosystem...
>>...to sort of kickstart a commercial UAV industry.
>>The technology that we've seen here in
this test is what would be the foundation for a follow-on program to really address
the issue of how can UAVs routinely operate in the national airspace system?
>>The primary benefit of this
technology is the ability of it to adapt to the unknown,
whether it be a system failure, battle damage, icing on the wing,
or flying in an unknown
atmospheric environment.
>>The aircraft may be able to be flown but the pilot may
or may not be able to find a solution to how to fly that aircraft.
>>Neural net control systems where the controls are going to teach themselves
and keep being smarter from flight to flight.
>>It can reconfigure the airplane in an optimal way in order to give you
the best flying qualities.
>>...rotate..
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>>There is no operator
of the vehicle itself on the ground.
Basically, the role that the human plays is more in managing the mission...
an orchestra director, not the instrument player.
>>...the vehicle will complete all the autonomous actions
necessary to release the weapon optimally positioned to hit the target.
>>One of the next things
that we'll be demonstrating in UCAV is the collaboration amongst aircraft...
How do sets of aircraft interact together in almost a social form?
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>>We're going to examine
the feasibility and technical utility of actually being able to fly
two airplanes or multiple aircraft in formation with each other.
>>Now, the trick to this is to make sure that they fly in formation closely enough
that they can extract the advantage without obviously running into each other.
>>The station keeping would be fairly close
proximity for hours; the work load on the flight crew would be quite high,
so we started to develop autonomous algorithms to do the station keeping,
so you basically would have an autopilot that you can engage.
>>The computers are flying the airplane without your stick
input even in the system. ...to allow a piloted airplane
to take two, three or four unpiloted vehicles on a long distance trip.
>>We're just getting started on this technology.
We'll use this technology to refuel unoccupied combat
air vehicles.
>>...the basket is slightly moving...looks like it's going high...
...ok it detected a miss and it came back on it's own...
I did not do anything.
She's got it.
Congratulations, guys. That was fantastic.
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>>The Autonomous Soaring
Project has one simple goal; it's to program a small UAV to soar in thermals similar
to the way a glider pilot or birds do; it has been reprogramed to automatically
detect that it's in an updraft and then use that updraft by circling.
There's a wide variety of applications for this technology
to help you UAVs do things like forest fire detection,
police surveillance, border patrol, and weather monitoring.
>>If the aircraft was damaged, you don't have to necessarily
just rely on the pilot to compensate and fly the airplane...
...adaptive flight controls, autonomous flight controls,
different things where we're using the airplane
to assist the pilot.
>>It would take over basically the controls of the airplane as far as flight stability.
>>The Platform Precision Autopilot is capable
of staying on a given path within about 15 feet.
It allows the synthetic aperture radar system
to fly over essentially the same path more than once.
This obviously has some potential applicability
when you're looking at Earth surface movements such as after an earthquake
or if you're looking at an ice pack melting.
>>The F-16,
we went out and tested the system and based them on actual mishap cases.
It prevented every single mishap. What we're developing here is merely an aid
should the pilot get distracted or disoriented.
By automating it, we can take out the pilot reaction time entirely.
>>The computer takes full control away from the pilot for a very brief
period of time and redirects the trajectory of the aircraft
to save the human.
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>>ADSB is Automatic
Dependent Surveillance Broadcast, it's equipment on board
an airplane that transmits its position and velocity information twice per second.
>>We were really trying to prove that we could use ADSB
as a way to do coordinated flight between multiple vehicles.
>>This system is present on a lot of manned aircraft but we were
one of the first UAS to perform testing of it in the national airspace.
NASA has a project for integrating UAS.
>>So one day, UAS could hopefully fly
with other commercial airlines and everybody will fly together safely.
>>There's various benefits to integrating unmanned aircraft,
being able to monitor specific weather systems, monitor
fires, delivering packages to your doorstep...
>>...operations to deliver medical emergency
supplies, infrastructure surveillance and monitoring...
>>The technical side is a big challenge, but being able to integrate them safely is maybe even a bigger challenge.
>>To have thousands of these vehicles
flying at the same time,
you're going to have to have
a lot more automation on the vehicle and in the airspace system.
>>Regulations for operations
of the vehicle, regulations for airspace, regulations for infrastructure.
>>These aircraft are going to be highly autonomous, piloted,
optionally piloted, unpiloted vehicle.
>>It's not just looking at the UAM, it's actually integrating the small
UAS, the package delivery, or even the larger cargo delivery.
>>Subscale aircraft, we use those for a variety of reasons to test things like new technology,
which could be hardware or software, or even a completely new vehicle.
You can do almost anything you want without much risk,
and you can realize those gains very quickly.
We're researching some level of autonomy.
The aircraft in most cases are capable of taking off,
flying around, and landing without any human intervention.
Things like, ArduPilots and multi rotors
and flying computers are allowing kids
to play with research type tools that they never had access to before.
So it's sort of driving
this new robotic learning type environment that never did exist.
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